Ebon Fisher is a media artist whose works explored the relationships between the public and the living information systems that emerge in neighborhoods."Ebon Fisher's AlulA Dimension" by Jennifer Dalton, Performing Arts Journal (PAJ), Johns Hopkins University Press, January 1998, p.62 Much of his early work in this area involved live information sharing rituals at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston nightclubs, and in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Fisher’s immersive theater company, Nerve Circle helped to transform that once economically distressed district.The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront by Cisco Bradley, Duke University Press, 2023, p. 38. In 1993, the largest of Fisher's immersive systems in Brooklyn featured 120 artists and musicians and included over 2,000 guests dancing in an abandoned mustard factory for 9 hours.Frank Popper, "From Technological to Virtual Art," MIT Press, 2007, p. 119 That event, called Organism, involved an unscripted layering of performance, music, sculpture, dance, and living systems that Fisher described as a “web jam.” The all night event has been cited as a "symbolic climax" to Williamsburg's emerging renaissance by Domus Magazine, and described in the Performing Arts Journal (PAJ) as “an organic, interactive, web-like model of artistic production.”"Ebon Fisher's AlulA Dimension" by Jennifer Dalton, Performing Arts Journal (PAJ), Johns Hopkins University Press, January 1998, p.63 Organism was also discussed in Die ZeitSteinberg, Claudia, "Vis a Vis Manhattan," Die Zeit, September 19, 1997, p. 77 and Newsweek,"Where Do We Go After the Rave?" by Melissa Rossi, Newsweek, July 26, 1993, p. 58 and featured in a timeline of the district’s transformation by the New York Times in 2024. Fisher’s diagrams of his immersive events, and his network ethics symbols, the "Bionic Codes,” that emerged from those systems, were carried forward into the early web. The Encyclopædia Britannica featured Fisher’s website as one of “The Web’s Best Sites” in 1994 at Brittanica.com“The Web’s Best Sites,” Arts & Entertainment, Britannica.com, 1994 and his Bionic Codes were presented from 1996 to 2006 in the Guggenheim Museum’s online CyberAtlas which curator Laura Trippi described in the Guggenheim Magazine as “the first concerted effort to chart the cultural terrain known as cyberspace.”"Intelligent Life" by Laura Trippi, Guggenheim Magazine, Spring 1997, p. 53; and CyberAtlas, an interactive web project curated by Jon Ippolito and Laura Trippi, Guggenheim Museum, 1996–2006
Fisher’s live, immersive media rituals, and his approach to culture as a "subjective ecosystem",Ebon Fisher, "The Future of Wiggling Things," Digital Creativity, Vol. 9 No. 1, 1998, p. 25 came to fruition in the 1990s at a time when both digital media and the study of human ecology began to emerge in the academic discourse. According to the arts historian, Cisco Bradley, Fisher’s manifesto from 1988, You Sub Mod, introduced a philosophy of environmental entanglement which helped to lay the philosophical foundation to Brooklyn Immersionism in the 1990s. “In many ways,” Bradley writes, “Immersionism was the next stage of evolution of the New York art scene.” In his book, The Williamsburg Avant Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront, Bradley quotes from Fisher's You Sub Mod:“Some theorists have characterized the period as one of immersionism, a kind of total artwork… As Ebon Fisher stated in 1988, in reference to the first use of the term: ‘You are the SUB MODERN. You live in a million tribes and burrows beneath the illusion we call the real world. While the Party passes over your heads you see its abject nakedness. You never believed in modernism and you aren’t fooled by its vain reflection, postmodernism… Without proclamation you have integrated yourself into the endless unfolding of spectacles. You found that to immerse yourself was the thing, sensing that objectivity was only another dream.’”The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront by Cisco Bradley, Duke University Press, 2023, p. 27
From art to living systems Cultivating media organisms Ebon Fisher's ecological approach to culture in Brooklyn was set against the backdrop of mid 20th century existentialism, an individualistic and human-centric philosophy, and the distancing aesthetics of postmodernism which was still popular in Manhattan throughout the 1980s."The Artists Who Defined the East Village’s Avant-Garde Scene” by M.H. Miller, New York Times, April 17, 2018.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/t-magazine/east-village-artist-jeff-koons-peter-halley.html The French art historian, Frank Popper, has stated in the book, Contemporary Artists, that Fisher's goal was to create neither art nor science, but to cultivate "the living properties of information." Citing a body of work spanning street graffiti, immersive rock performance, information sharing theater and viral network ethics, Popper states: “[Fisher’s creations] can be seen as an effort at moving our collective gaze away from both art and science and towards the nurturing of ‘life’ in the broadest, non-objective, and non-human sense. It is an attempt to seed a form of ‘subjective ecology.’ This leads, among other things, to a de-centered authorship where one creates with the community, with the medium, and with nature.” Fisher's experimental theater company, Nerve Circle, cultivated what Fisher called "media organisms.” These were a series of living information sharing systems that helped to build a creative community and eventually revitalize a distressed industrial area of Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1990s. Fisher and other Immersionists eventually catalyzed a renaissance that spread through much of Brooklyn.The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront by Cisco Bradley, Duke University Press, 2023, p. 27 In 2024, The New York Times included Organism among the immersive events that established Brooklyn as “Where It's At” in New York's cultural life. Earlier, in Domus Magazine, Suzan Wines described that all night, weblike system as a “symbolic climax” to Williamsburg’s creative emergence: "Conceived by Ebon Fisher, Organism became a kind of symbolic climax to the renegade activity that had been stirring within the community since the late eighties. It exploited the notion of architecture as living event, breathing and transforming for fifteen hours in an abandoned mustard factory."Suzan Wines, "Go with the Flow: Eight New York Based Artists and Architects in the Digital Era," Domus, February 1998, p. 84
Fisher called his immersive systems company Nerve Circle to draw attention to the living social nervous system it was intended to help cultivate. In his introduction to a museum exhibition at the University of Illinois in 1993, the art historian, Jonathan Fineberg spoke of Fisher’s commitment to abandon the rubric of high art built within a narrow academic discourse, and to create collaboratively with his Brooklyn neighborhood: "After twenty-five years of a language-based focus to the art world – hand in hand with the demise of confidence in the ability of 'vanguard' artists to affect culture by showing radical work in SoHo galleries (much less ones in Kreuzberg or the Marais) – many artists today are returning to immediate experience, to the body, and to a neighborhood cultural interaction. As Ebon Fisher, a key figure on the Williamsburg scene recently told me, 'we're not making art out here, we're creating culture.'"Introduction by Jonathan Fineberg to the catalogue for the exhibition, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, curated by Fineberg for the Krannert Art Museum (University of Illinois, 1993).
Living systems at the MIT Media Lab While still a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ebon Fisher was appointed by Professor Muriel Cooper to teach an immersive media course, Creative Seeing to undergraduates at the MIT Media Lab at its inception in 1985. Cybergrace: the Search for God in the Digital World by Jennifer Cobb, Crown Publishers, 1988, p. 236. ISBN 0-517-70679--2 Running for two years, Fisher's course helped to establish the Media Lab as a think tank that explored new approaches to media, information and living systems. Moving beyond Marshall McLuhan's definition of media as an extension of the human being, and beyond technological consumerism, Fisher presented the arts and media as an equal relationship between humans and their environment. He invited students to join him in public media experiments in the streets of Cambridge; to analyze television on the top of the tallest building on campus; and to experience total sensory deprivation inside MIT’s anechoic chamber."Transformations in the Nervepool: The Rituals & Zoacodes of Ebon Fisher," catalog for a retrospective at University of Northern Iowa Gallery of Art curated by Darrell Taylor, 2006 Drawing from these experiences, Fisher began to formulate an immersive rock theater company, Nerve Circle in 1986 that introduced biological systems and themes into public spaces."Ebon Fisher's AlulA Dimension" by Jennifer Dalton, Performing Arts Journal (PAJ), Johns Hopkins University Press, January 1998, p.62 After performances at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Arts, Boston rock clubs and the Institute of Contemporary Art, three Boston police officers shut down a performance of Nerve Circle’s “Evolution of the Grid” at a party in Fisher's studio. The intrusion led to an eviction from Fisher’s loft near Boston’s Fort Point Channel, convincing Fisher to move to Brooklyn where his experimental nature might be more fully embraced.Jennifer Dalton, "Ebon Fisher's AlulA Dimension," Performing Arts Journal, Johns Hopkins University Press, January 1998, p. 62
Brooklyn In 1988, two years after receiving a Master of Science from MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Fisher moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn where he became part of the Brooklyn Immersionists arts movement. That movement created art with a focus on environment in Williamsburg's then-rundown waterfront area. Fisher and his colleagues in the Immersionist movement focused on ecologicy and neighborhood participation in local zines like Waterfront Week and Worm Magazine, among others.
As a featured artist at Williamsburg's Test-Site Gallery, Fisher started a media store in the entrance, and launched public events like The Salon of the Mating Spiders, which showcased 600 local artists.Interview by Francesco Bonami with Annie Herron, Flash Art, January/February 1993. For the event, Fisher did not impose restrictions on size and medium. The gallery director, Annie Herron said in Flash Art that “At first I thought it was crazy,” but then said that the Salon of the Mating Spiders had become her best-selling show with six hundred artists lined up around the block to install work of every kind in every conceivable space.Interview by Francesco Bonami with Annie Herron, Flash Art, January/February 1993.